Daily Archives: April 26, 2010

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Health, Humanities

Fitter

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Spring                                                       Waxing Flower Moon

Kate called from the Northstar.  She arrives in Anoka at 5:52.  She took the light rail to Target Field and caught the train home from there.  Feels like living in Connecticut.  I’m glad to have her home.  This is a two-person house and needs both of us to make it run smoothly.

Got the results of the fitness assessment I did last week.   The heart rate thresholds were not very dissimilar from the ones I had been using, though the max is about 10 beats higher and the mid-range of low is about 3 beats higher.  I got some good recommendations on how to modify my aerobic work and, as I hoped, the whole experience gave me a jump start back to the more comprehensive workout I had been doing before Christmas.  It involves flexibility, muscle warmup and stretching and resistance.  I kept faith with the cardio, but I’d let the other stuff slide.

Spread more compost and worked it in.  I’m almost ready to plant.  In fact I may plant tomorrow morning before I amend the soil in the next bed, the one with the garlic and the lilies.  The garlic and onions and parsnips look healthy, as does the asparagus and the strawberries.  The bed for the leeks and the sugar snap peas and the bok choy needs some weeding and some soil amending, too.  In the next day or two I should have all the transplants and seeds in that go in now.  Just got word that the potatoes are on their way, so I have to get some more composted manure for the potato/bush bean bed.

Last night I did research on four of the ArtRemix objects and I’ll finish all 8 of them before Friday.  The tour itself is not until May 7th.  Thrashing around the enlightenment, romanticism, modernism, Liberalism, post-modernism, Vico and Rousseau.  I want to arrive at a synthesis between enlightenment thought and the thought of its primary critics, those in the romantic family of thinkers:  Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Vico, Burke, Hume.  Maybe somebody else has done it, but I want to do it my way.

Aging, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Weather +Climate

The Great Wheel

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Spring                                              Waxing Flower Moon

As spring winds down toward Beltane on May 1st, the green up has taken on an accelerated pace.  We have leaves on trees like the Amur Maples, ash and feathery new leaves on the oaks as well.   The daffodils and tulips have brightened our April for some weeks now.  The more integrated I become to this property and its transitions, the more I can layer them in my head.  That is, as this moment of greening and flowering promises a new season, the needed resurrection of the plant world, I can also see late August and September when the florescence begins to yield to brown, to decay, to dieing back.  The two are not polar opposites but places on a continuum that extends not only from season to season but from year to year, decade to decade, century to century.

This layered sensibility is one of the privileges of staying in place, where the rhythms of the land call different things out of me.   As Rachel Carson said, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.”

This rhythm, the Great Wheel, teaches us about our experience of life, about life’s ongoing struggle against entropy, a struggle always lost, yet a struggle always valiant and often joyful even though destined to end in tragedy.

I hope your life has a springtime right now, one in which the trees have begun to leaf out, the daffodils have bloomed and the first vegetables have started their journey toward your table.